José Manuel Prieto - Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia

Many, many years. Her taste was astonishingly developed, as I already knew (it wasn’t a question of having or not having good taste). She’d imagined I would scold her in annoyance: “My God, you’ve been playing the flute since you were seven but you still don’t know how to put makeup on?” It surprised her when I explained patiently how futile her little last-minute protest was.

“LINDA, the dress is yours, it’s a gift.”

“You’re completely inconsistent! Your thesis. . The novel you say you’re writing. .”

“It’s because I had warmer tones in mind for you. Look at this print. Why do you need more color? I’ll wait for you to change your makeup, but you must do it quickly. It’s almost eight.”

“знаеш!” In her indignation she switched automatically into a harder form of Russian. “ Znaesh! ” (She meant: “Know what? I can walk out of here right now.”) She drew a breath. “Give me back the pictures!”

Ay, I was expecting this! I took out the Polaroids and held them in front of her eyes like a man about to plunge a piece of litmus paper into the test solution. LINDA changed color beneath her mask and stared at them in fascination. “It’s as if years had gone by, as if they were very old pictures,” she murmured.

That was what she said, in a very small thread of voice. “It’s as if years had gone by. .” I wasn’t expecting such a crushing reaction. A devastating chill advanced along my spine and LINDA’S smooth face became impenetrable once more. She raised her eyes slowly to ask me another question, to tell me something I could no longer hear and her two obols flecked with green and black settled a cold gaze upon me, a gaze that was inhuman , unblinking.

II. In biographies of Thomas Aquinas we find the same alarm followed with sudden rage triggered by a serious mistake on the part of his mentor, Albertus Magnus: the automaton or alchemical doll. Allow me to explain: the construction of an android is a false path, a dead end by which we will never reach the SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE. It offers a mechanical solution — creation not in the image but in the semblance — when the true solution verges on ghostliness, the generation of a mental world created entirely out of such stuff as dreams are made on. (Necesse est ponere aliquas creaturas incorporeas. Id enim quod praecipue in rebus creatis Deus intendit est bonum quod consistit in assimilatione ad Deum. Perfecta autem assimilatio effectus ad causam attenditur, quando effectus imitatur causam secundum illud per quod causa producit effectum; sicut calidum facit calidum. Deus autem creaturam producit per intellectum et voluntatem, ut supra ostensum est. Unde ad perfectionem universi requiritur quod sint aliquae creaturae intellectuales. Intelligere autem non potest esse actus corporis, nec alicuius virtutis corporeae, quia omne corpus determinatur ad hic et nunc. Unde necesse est ponere, ad hoc quod universum sit perfectum, quod sit aliqua incorporea creatura.) (Or: There must be some incorporeal creatures. For what is principally intended by God in creatures is good, and this consists in assimilation to God Himself. And the perfect assimilation of an effect to a cause is accomplished when the effect imitates the cause according to that whereby the cause produces the effect; as heat makes heat. Now, God produces the creature by His intellect and will. Hence the perfection of the universe requires that there should be intellectual creatures. Now intelligence cannot be the action of a body, nor of any corporeal faculty, for every body is limited to “here” and “now.” Hence the perfection of the universe requires the existence of an incorporeal creature. — Treatise on the Angels (QQ [50] a. 1, Saint Thomas Aquinas, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province)

MASTER AND MARGARITA, THE (Мáстер и Маргар та). “Listen, we have makeup experts who can spend a whole hour just preparing the face for a normal workday. You’ll have to get through a short trial period during which we decide whether or not to hire you, but that will be better for you than playing the FLUTE at the cathedral. We’ll be working on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg — there are extremely beautiful spots there; ever visited the (CHINESE) PALACE? — and then, if you really are what we’re looking for (and I’m almost sure you are), we’ll travel south, to YALTA, for a cover photo — redheads are big this year. The work will be exhausting, I’m warning you, but there are a lot of girls who’d give almost anything to be in your place.

“You never wanted to be a model? You think it’s a job for women who are stupid? You’re wrong. There is an intelligence in beauty, a true feeling that can alter the silhouette of a pair of legs, penetrate the occult meaning of rouge and expensive face creams. What interests me is the possibility of removing you from your animal state, endowing you with eyes that will allow you to contemplate the world in a more precise way. This will be easy; you have the natural intelligence of your red hair. A while ago, as I watched you playing in the cathedral, nothing in your face, neither your speckled eyes nor your Slavic cheekbones, caught my attention. Everything changed, as you know, when I watched your hair fall over your shoulders.

“I seek to expand the borders of the moment, to capture all signals, painstakingly, to stop the passage of time in a perfect second of heightened perception: the pleasing touch of a linen shirt, your full, arched eyebrows, the breeze that dries us off after a warm bath. It’s as if I were to tempt you with immortality, though I am not an emissary from the devil. Notice my shoes. Aren’t they beautiful? The signals arrive in such profusion and are so dissimilar that they demand a keen eye, a highly trained intelligence.”

(I patted my portfolio.) “I have here a dossier I’ve been assembling for several months. I’ll keep the photos I’ve taken of you today here, too, so that half a year from now you can see yourself as you once were. You’ll be amazed at how vague your eyes were, without the fixity of a subtler appreciation, a purer decanting. I’m sure you’ll get there soon. That’s what I’m here for. The main thing is to meet the person who can give you this kind of polish. It will be as if I were teaching you to sing and, in fact, that’s exactly what I want to do: nuance the voice of your gaze, your bearing, so you won’t be swept along by your natural tone, but will build constructions that shift at every moment, leave an empty space, create a hollow that then becomes your voice, which hits a note that rings from a thousand points like one of those amazing singers of spirituals.

“In fact, I must now confess: I don’t actually work for a fashion house. But that in no way alters the meaning of my invitation. I deal in real life; I seek to confer upon it the luster of a finished product, ready for the marketplace. I move the clouds in the sky, add light and air to distant vistas, accentuate the green of trees and lawns, seek to awaken a reality that will be more blue and more red. This is a private initiative, and I require a woman, a redhead such as yourself, to help me bring the project to a successful conclusion. You had already almost agreed to pose for a fashion magazine. What I’m proposing is that you pose for this novel. It amounts to the same thing, essentially. In fact it’s better, because you’ll actually experience everything that’s generally left outside the frame in photography. Okay, I know that in the OCCIDENT very rich models make two million dollars a year and wouldn’t see the life you’ll lead as even remotely luxurious. That’s just a detail, a small incongruence of scale. You’ll get used to it, LINDA,” I said, calling her by her name for the first time. “It’s as if you’d been working at a soda fountain or a cheap café and were discovered there and cast in the role of The Rise and Rise of the Girl from Nowhere. ”